Peer Pressure
by Fidget
Summary: Fred reflects on people's impressions of himself and his twin, and their impression's effects on them both.


**Peer Pressure**

**Summary:**Fred reflects on just how similar he and his twin are.

* * *

People ask me what it's like to be a twin.

What a stupid question to ask someone. How am I supposed to know what the differences are from twins to an individual when I've never _not_ been a twin? I'm used to being Fred of "Fred and George".

No one ever says his name first. _Ever_. We're FredandGeorge, the Twins. I guess people don't think it sounds right to say "George and Fred". I wouldn't know. I don't speak about myself in third-person much. Kind of weird that my name's first, really, since he's the older one. Six minutes and thirteen seconds older. But no one knows that, either. No one even bothers to ask us. Parvati and Padma Patil are asked who's older, but never FredandGeorge. We popped out at the same time, probably already holding a Filibuster wet-start in our hands and able to speak insults. That's why no one knows who spoke first, either.

It used to drive us crazy. We enjoyed having a twin and everything, but it was sort of belittling to have everyone think we were exactly the same. We used to spend long times in front of the mirror, looking at ourselves and at each other, reveling in our differences. He has freckles in different places than I do, my ears are smaller. I have this weird cowlick on my left temple where I once singed all the hair off (evidently, George has faster reflexes than I do, too). And even identical twins have different fingerprints. The most obvious is a big, circular whorl on my right thumb, where he only has a small loop.

We act different, too. People wouldn't believe us if we just said that to them, but we do. George is quieter than I am. He would probably get in a lot less trouble than me, if he didn't keep jumping in to back me up when I start a stupid argument. He doesn't agree, but I think he makes the plans work, too. I get wild ideas about something we could do, and we both brainstorm on how it could work, but George really fine-tunes it. Our stuff would never come off so smoothly if he didn't think out the catches and fix them.

But to everyone else, we're a single entity. Practically joined at the hip. If ever one of us had detention and the other didn't, people would really feel out of their depth. They'd probably send us to counseling or something. Everyone'd assume there was some sort of family crisis. Because at school, no one wants to hear that we're different. It's sort of become part of our act. We're carbon copies of each other, identical to the last hair on our heads. It's all they know about us, all we get bombarded with 24-7: _You're exactly the same!_

But we didn't believe that. We knew we had differences.

There's a weird thing about people. No matter how hard you try, no matter how much you might think you believe something, popular opinion can always sway you. _Always_. So when George and I looked at each other when we were eleven, about to go off to Hogwarts, we could see how we looked different from each other. But as we got older, we started to notice...

We were twelve. It was the summer between our first and second year at Hogwarts. I got out of the shower and was combing down my hair, as per usual, when I noticed something odd. It wasn't sticking up on the left side like it usually did. It combed flat down.

George's shower was next, and he was pounding on the door. "Are you going to spend all night in there?"

I shrugged it off, thinking my scalp had finally healed, grabbed my clothes and headed out.

George noticed it. He commented on it later, thinking it odd to have disappeared just like that. No one else in the family noticed, though. Not even Mum. And certainly no one at school, who didn't think there were any differences to begin with.

No one noticed when George grew into his big ears, and mine just stayed the same size compared to my head. No one noticed when, over the summer between our third and fourth year, we both got entirely new freckles on our faces. Checking that August in the mirrors, we made the disconcerting discovery that they all matched _perfectly_. We put it off to a summer spent outside, and ignored it. After all, no one else thought it was weird.

No one _else_ saw we were losing our individuality.

I know that people can change what you think. I know that if enough people around you believe something, it takes someone really strong to keep their individual opinion. To keep their individual _anything_. And so I sit here on the side of my twin's bed, both of us holding up our hands to the lamp, comparing the pads of our fingers. Neither of us says a thing for a few minutes, but we're both thinking the same thought. Finally...

"George?"

"Yes, Fred?"

"It could be that I'm imagining it, but..."

"...Your loop is looking distinctly..."

"...Whorly, yes."

"Yes."

I know that people's opinions can change what you think and leech your individuality. I wonder, sometimes, whether George and I were slowly convinced we were the same, and sort of...subconsciously willed our differences away. Imagined them away, I guess. But I'm still left with this...this conundrum. If no one else noticed our differences disappearing...

If no one noticed them disappearing, did we imagine our differences away, or did we imagine them there in the first place?


End file.
